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How to Keep Your App Online on a Free Plan: Supabase, Vercel, Netlify

Guide · 9:43 videoChecked against the official sources

Sources checked 11 Oct 2026 · Published 11 Oct 2026 · Last reviewed 11 Oct 2026 · By Ctrl+Z Therapy (how we test)

The short answer

A free plan can stop your app in three ways: a pause (Supabase pauses free projects with low activity over 7 days), a limit (go over a quota and the project goes read-only, slows down or gets paused; on Netlify all your projects pause when the credits run out), or a rule (Vercel's Hobby plan is for non-commercial personal use only). Read the warning emails, check your usage pages, back up a free Supabase database yourself, and upgrade the part that would stop first when real users depend on it.

Three ways a free plan stops your app

  • A pause: nobody used it, so it goes to sleep.
  • A limit: you used too much, so it stops or slows down.
  • A rule: you used it for something the free plan doesn't allow.

Supabase

  • Supabase pauses Free Plan projects that show low activity over a 7-day period. The docs say "low activity", not zero: you can be using the project and it may still not be enough.
  • You get two emails: a warning roughly one week before the pause, and a confirmation once it's paused. After the warning you can prevent the pause by opening the project in the dashboard or sending real requests from your app. Paid projects are never paused for inactivity.
  • To bring a paused project back: open the dashboard, pick the project, click Resume project and confirm. It returns with its data and settings. You have 1 year to restore it. After that it can no longer be restored from the dashboard, but you can still download the database backup and Storage files from Project Overview before the project is deleted.
  • Free plan limits: 500 MB database, 5 GB egress plus a separate 5 GB of cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 50 MB per file, 2 active free projects, and no automatic backups. Supabase recommends that free projects export their data regularly and keep a copy somewhere else.
  • Over 500 MB, the project goes read-only: your app can still read but can't save anything new. The error Supabase documents is "cannot execute INSERT in a read-only transaction". The way out is upgrading to Pro or freeing up space yourself, with the steps on Supabase's database size page (back up first).
  • Keep going over the free quotas and Supabase notifies you and gives you a grace period; after that it can restrict the project, for example by answering every API request with a 402 status code and a reason. Restrictions lift when the quota refills at the next billing cycle, or right away if you upgrade.
  • Storage is measured as an average over the billing period, so deleting files late in the cycle lowers it only gradually. Delete files through the dashboard or the Storage API: deleting rows from the storage tables with SQL leaves the real files behind.
  • Free projects run on the smallest compute. It can briefly burst each day using a disk IO budget; when the budget runs out, it drops back to its baseline speed, requests take longer, and the docs say the instance may become unresponsive. Check it under Observability, then Database Health.

Netlify

  • Accounts created after September 4, 2025 use credit-based plans; older accounts are on legacy plans with different rules.
  • The free plan gives 300 credits a month with a hard limit. Each successful production deploy costs 15 credits; deploy previews, branch deploys, failed deploys and rollbacks cost nothing. Bandwidth and web requests use credits too.
  • When the credits are used up, all your projects pause, not just one. Visitors see a "Site not available" page and you can't publish new production deploys.
  • On the free plan you can't buy more credits: upgrade, or wait for the next billing cycle, when your projects resume on their own. Your balance is under Usage & billing, then Credit balance.

Vercel (Hobby)

  • Hobby is for non-commercial personal use only. Vercel's examples of commercial use include taking payments from visitors, advertising a product or service for sale, getting paid to build or host the site, and running ads such as AdSense. Asking for donations is not commercial use.
  • Hobby includes a monthly allowance, for example 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1,000,000 function invocations and 5,000 image transformations.
  • Over the image limit, new images fail with a 402 error; images already optimized keep working, and you're not charged.
  • Go over other limits for too long and Vercel can pause the deployment; visitors get a 503 DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED error. Vercel's pages differ on what happens next: the Hobby page says that in most cases you wait until 30 days have passed, the help article says paused projects resume one at a time and never automatically. Check each project in your dashboard.
  • Your usage is under Usage in the dashboard sidebar. Pro starts at $20 a month, with one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit included.

Render

  • Free web services spin down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic; the next visitor waits about a minute while it spins up.
  • Each workspace gets 750 free instance hours per month; use them up and your free web services are suspended until the next month.
  • A free Render Postgres database expires 30 days after creation. You then have 14 days to upgrade it; after that, Render deletes it with all its data.

Lovable Cloud

  • If your app uses Lovable Cloud, Lovable's own rules apply. Their docs say the built-in backend utilizes Supabase's open-source foundation.
  • The free plan includes 20 Cloud credits a month. The backend pauses only when your workspace has no credits left. Your data stays safe, but you can't access or export it until the services run again. If it's still paused after adding credits, open More → Cloud → Overview and click Wake up.
  • The Supabase free plan limits above aren't listed in Lovable's docs, so check Lovable's own pages.

Keep-alive scripts?

  • Supabase's docs only suggest real activity after their warning email; they don't approve keep-alive scripts anywhere.
  • Vercel says circumventing its limits is a violation of its fair use guidelines.
  • If real people depend on your app, a free plan that can pause is the wrong home for it.

Checklist

  1. Know which of the three can stop you: pause, limit or rule.
  2. Read the warning emails. Supabase and Netlify send them before anything stops.
  3. Look at your usage pages once a week: your Supabase organization's usage page, Netlify's Usage & billing, Vercel's Usage.
  4. Back up your free Supabase database yourself.
  5. Taking payments or running ads on Vercel? You need Pro.
  6. When real users depend on it, upgrade the part that would stop first. Supabase Pro starts at $25 a month with a spend cap on by default, Netlify Personal is $9 a month, Vercel Pro starts at $20.

Sources

Checked on 11 Oct 2026. Prices, limits and settings change, so check the source before you rely on them.